@derp said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:
They just go in and decimate and then pat themselves on the back for staying the 'good guys' after their inevitable baseless murders.
GM: You just murdered a bunch of children.
Player: Noooo, I murdered kobold children.
As a former cop, I concur. There were many times I thought, "Just shut the fuck up and let me do my job."
Since we have a long running discussion about gay characters in a lords & ladies setting, I figured a constructive thread discussing ways to do a server that is open to alternatives for lords & ladies would be a good idea.
Let's start by establishing a baseline. The bog standard L&L setting is heavily patriarchal, is monogamous or polygynous, has political power held entirely or almost entirely by male characters, and has bloodline being tied to political power.
As the central conceit of the lords & ladies genre of MU*s is that there is a class-system in the setting, suggestions should aim to maintain that aspect of the lords & ladies veneer, meaning that a peerage exists within the setting and that the right to rule is somehow maintained in a verisimilitudinous/believable manner. An idea for a server with a classless society would not fit with the discussion; though, it might still be an interesting server idea to pursue.
Discussion should be constructive, as this is not the Hogpit, and should focus on how suggestions could be made better, on inconsistencies, on interesting offshoots or elaborations to an idea, on the verisimilitude/believability of the system, on blindspots the the writer might not be aware of in their idea, etc.
I'll start. These will just be quick rundowns rather than full explorations of the ideas.
Matrilineal, non-matrimonial society. Political power and titles are passed down solely through mothers to their children. Marriage doesn't exist. No one cares who your father is. A prince could become the king because his mom is the queen. His children won't inherit his political title all. His sister's children would. The prince, as a king, would not have a queen consort.
Matrilineal, matrimonial society. Same as above but there is marriage, likely only for political reasons. A prince could become the king because his mom is the queen. The king consort might be his father or might not. Maybe his father was the hunky stablehand the queen had a dalliance with before she was married. It doesn't matter. The prince, once he is king, could marry someone, male or female, but the ones who will inherit his title would, again, be his sister's children not his.
Spouses and consorts/concubines. Spouses are partners who are peers or are peers of roughly the same rank. Consorts/concubines are partners who are commoners or commoners and peers of significantly lower rank. Children of spouses have the highest legitimacy to inherit, but children of consorts/concubines also can inherit if there are no spousal children or perhaps can inherit in other circumstances to be defined by the setting. Heirs can be adopted and take the same rank as children of consorts/concubines.
Authority equals ass-kicking. This is the most metal/badass option for a lords & ladies game. Might makes right...to rule. The king/queen doesn't wear a crown; they wear a title belt. The king/queen isn't the king/queen because of who their parents are; they're king/queen because they kicked the ass of the previous king/queen and no one else has been able to take the title from them yet. No one cares who marries who or whose children are whose. This might work in a shonen lords & ladies game or maybe a very high magic setting where the king/queen is the strongest sorcerer in the land and all the dukes/duchesses, counts/countesses, and barons/baronesses are progressively weaker wielders of magic.
Yeah, my favorite Chinese restaurant was a place in the early '90s. You got those as an appetizer, and they did family style dinners, so your order came out on a big platter to be shared. Then Chinese buffets became a big thing, so much so that even this place switched to buffet style, which made me sad. It also sucked that it was my deceased father's favorite restaurant and it changed after he died, so we couldn't even go to the place he liked anymore just to enjoy it and remember him.
I am fine with people having settings that avoid certain themes, even historical fantasy settings. As long as everything makes enough sense not to break my suspension of disbelief. Slavery can be removed for a good portion of American history from sometime between 1800 and 1850 on by delaying the creation of the cotton gin. Without the increased efficiency, cotton never became king, and slavery eventually phased out like it had in the North. You also don't end up with the Civil War or a very different Civil War at least.
In general, I think as long as at least some sort of effort is put into the logic of how something would change or develop differently, people can swallow the change without much argument.
Yeah, they got rid of an important line and added a mostly useless line.
@Misadventure said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
There are other minor issues of continuity that also intrude, like one group poses just coming in from pouring rain, and two poses later people come into the scene talking about the break in the weather, or you start your scene at IC time, but it ruins slower than IC time, so you have folks showing up for nighttime in the middle of your lunch scene.
Those sound like issues with not providing a proper set for new arrivals or new arrivals not waiting for the set. The first is an understandable oopsie. The second is annoying as hell. No one's writing is so fantastic that it cannot wait for those in the room to give a set and some poses.
They're remaking Gothic 1!
And they've fucking AAA-ed it out the wazoo - starting the intro off with Michael Bay-splosions, so the ADD-afflicted players don't get bored in the first two minutes; limiting your exploration, because CoD-railroads are all we do now; making the main character insufferably annoying in personality (Worst. Writing. Ever!); having everyone treat the main character like he's the chosen one, because gods forbid we start the hero's journey at the beginning instead of at the point where people want to fellate you just for being the awesome you; and making the main character able to go toe-to-toe with creatures that were mid-game challenge and would one shot you at the start of the game in the original, because challenging games are apparently not a thing (cough Dark Souls cough). It's like none of the current devs have actually played the original where everyone treats you like a piece of shit nobody in a penal colony, because you are a piece of shit nobody in a penal colony, until you level up and have ingratiated yourself into the factions. This game was a fucking masterpiece that was overshadowed by Morrowind and NWN when it came out, and they're trying to make it a Witcher 3 clone.
EDIT - For anyone who has never played or even heard of this game (likely as it is a cult classic), here is an excellent review by my favorite Youtuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvpnl24kFxs
@cura said in What does Immersion mean to you in MUs?:
I think that's because it's less that it 'maintains the illusion of a false reality so that I can believe it exists,' and more about 'getting into an empathetic headspace where I can put myself in the fiction and thus interact with it in authentic and organic ways.'
I would call the first "suspension of disbelief" and the second comes close to what immersion is. Suspension of disbelief is accepting that China and it's people exist while I sit here in my apartment in a Midwestern city. Immersion would be visiting Chinatown and eating at an authentic Chinese restaurant.
@ZombieGenesis You just described what is essentially Stargate SG-1's whole schtick - central base with thousands of worm holes to explore. Why not use that instead? They even have 4-men teams, so you can avoid a starship full of NPCs.
Did you like the game Snake?
Does mass transit give you a (lady)boner?
If you answered "yes" to both questions, I present to you...
It is exactly what it says on the tin, and it is hilarious and fun.
@Ghost You forgot the +burninate command.
@Ghost A lot of the social mechanics used are adapted from tabletop which are primarily cooperative PvE rather than PvP. I really don't put much faith in them for that reason. The other reason is that they usually treat social interactions as just another form of combat with very similar systems and, in the end, they aren't the same and really require different methods for handling resolution, especially in a PvP environment. Just look at D&D 3e Diplomacy rules for a broken mess: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/683/roleplaying-games/diplomacy-design-notes-part-i
My adventure was very quick and successful. It started with the app asking for my email address, and continued with me clicking the little X icon at the top right of the browser window.
I won.
Nice try, though. Good game. I am willing to give it a rematch any time, but I suspect all of the matches will result in numerous victories for me and none for the app, which would get tiresome.
@Coin Speaking of trailers for new series, I saw the one for "The Boys" today. I had never heard of the comic or the new series until today. After reading the premise - a CIA group of superheroes dedicated to monitoring and stopping out of control superheroes - I now want to play a MU* of that. Considering that I have never been interested in superhero MU*s, this is a big step for me.
EDIT - Thinking about it, this idea and the Wuxia idea are kind of similar. You have a semi-secret group dedicated to rooting out evil in the world with unnatural powers.
@Pyrephox uses Wall of Text. It is super-effective.
I worry about how much GM intervention some of the ideas would need. Also, as pointed out, it doesn't address immediate scene issues that require fast resolution, like bluffing a guard.
I'm currently at work, so don't have the time to write out a lengthy reply. However, I wanted to note that I am one of those weirdos that doesn't like playing MU*s set in pre-existing IPs. However I do like some sort of elevator pitch description that does use existing IPs. For example: "It's Gothic meets Minecraft, Breath of the Wild, and Horizon: Zero Dawn."
So far I am hearing a few solutions:
Use a social combat system.
Get rid of social stats entirely.
Use a resource system giving higher social stat characters access to more resources.
Remove dialogue entirely from RP and keep using social combat. Just like people post "Bob swings his sword at Alice," social interactions will consist of "Bob greets Alice and tries to sell her beachfront property in Montana."
Utilize a storygame system rather than the standard Tabletop RP paradigm we have been using. Example: troupe style system where all characters go on the roster when their current player logs off, so a character can be played by many people over the course of a week and attachments to individual characters are minimized, increasing ooc-ic separation.
The Boys was good, but really dark...
EDIT -- I moved The Boys review to the appropriate thread.
On the topic of game setting ideas, seeing the show got me to thinking about a Supers MU* like I discussed above - the PCs are members of a Supers monitoring bureau. Unlike the Boys, it would be a legitimate organization consisting or normies and supers. It would be a grey op organization but treated as a bit of a joke, because it isn't glamorous "heroic" work.
That works for them, since they don't want the showy, fame-hungry, star-studded, flashy powered supes. They want supes with subtle and utility oriented powers. If given the choice between Superman or Batman, they would take Batman every time, both because he is a normies and also because he has contingencies for everything. So among the supers who get turned down from the Justice League and The Seven, they pick from the rejects the ones that are best fits and go about their work mostly in the shadows.
It would be street level supers working with a highly competent if questionably legal and ethical organization to take down problematic world's class supers with as little fanfare as possible. So the Boys, Sci-Fi's The Invisible Man, Hitman video games, and every action soy movie ever in a blender.
I have no idea what codebase of tabletop RPG system would be best to run such an setting, as it would need to accommodate for wide power rangers.
